That Final Bed

Fog covered the river as he walked alongside it. The fall always brought this sense of foreboding to Jonas Meyers. As he ambled along the paved riverside walk, it seemed to him that it had always been so. The fog hovered over the water, which lay perfectly still in response, as if allowing itself to be overcome. Jonas didn't notice such details all the time, only today, as he walked home from the doctor.

---

Twenty-odd Years Prior

Jonas sat at the head of the table and allowed himself a moment of indulgence. The eyes of his entire family and some of his extended family fell upon him as he rose. Jonas became a bit self conscious with all this attention focused on him, but proceeded through some sense of force, some passion. He spoke about the blessings the family had received and thanked, with subtle eloquence, the higher power. He repeated phrases like: endless bounty, passionate love and even, sweet and spectacular life.

It was the night before Christmas, and all of these things came out of him just as he had planned, just as he had seen a thousand times. His own father, countless television Christmas specials, the encouragement of his wife, Lydia, all came to be as he spoke. Then they ate, and the eating was entered into in a silence filled with embarrassment and pride.

Jonas's son, Murray, got a-water aquarium that year and Jonas spent all night putting the thing together. He wanted to have the fish swimming in it when the boy woke up, but the Ph levels still weren't anywhere near safe. Jonas sat up all night, testing and retesting the water.

The next morning, Christmas morning, Jonas and Lydia moved slowly around the kitchen, keeping the children waiting in an exciting abuse of power, Jonas felt the twinge of guilt as he poured sugar into his coffee. There should be more presents, he thought. Last night the feeling had been painfully obvious to him as he dozed and tested the water. His daughter Maggie had about 12 things to unwrap. Three other gifts were still in the closet, going back to the store the next day. Murray would certainly rant and probably cry if he received even one less gift than his sister. So each had 12, and Murray anticipated the looks he might receive when the unwrapping was all done. He poured more sugar into his coffee. It tasted bitter.

---

Jonas pushed the key into the lock on his thick mahogany door. It dragged on the carpet as he pushed it open. Every movement he made carried a new weight since the doctor's office. Not that he was shocked, Jonas had known that he was dying much longer than anyone else would have imagined. Having a timeframe was something new, though. While picking up the bottle of wine for dinner, Jonas had marveled at the emptiness of the grocery store. Items upon items stacked together, but still empty space filled the enclosure to a wide degree. The store was a place he knew he would return. This would not do as a goodbye between this fine establishment and Jonas Meyers.

Lydia kept to herself as Jonas entered the living room. She was reading a book called The Undesired Reasons of Living. Jonas walked past her with a glance. One reason Jonas and Lydia's marriage had lasted so long, Jonas always professed, was because neither would interrupt the other's reading. Jonas's mind was buzzing and he stepped into his study to check on some of his personal finances. He would have to make some pretty drastic moves now to save his family the trouble later. But it didn't matter, he was going to die-

And he stopped completely as he was closing the door to his study. There it was. That thought that would now be with him every day. It gave him pause now because it came so casually, so transparently into his world, and just as he had found some action with which to take his mind off the subject. He was going to die.

He collapsed into his chair, the task of his finances seeming immediately less important. He allowed himself a few minutes of total grief for himself, sobbed into his tie. He reached out to a picture of his children that sat on his desk. They were 12 and 15 in the picture, all cowlicks and toothy grins. Maggie had awkward braces on, and she wore large framed glasses as if to take her accentuate her awkward teenage road through puberty. She had changed so much. Soon, Jonas thought, my changes will stop forever. Some years after that, Maggie's changes willstop forever. Why doesn't anyone care enough to stop this? And he sobbed as he flipped on his computer and took care of his finances.

IN the living room, Lydia suddenly remembered that her husband had returned home, and that he might have some kind of news, since he was returning from the doctor. In her mind, she cursed as she marked the book and put it down. She cared deeply about her husband, but moments like these made it seem that she did not, that she was selfish, and this was the last thing she wanted to think about herself as a wife and a mother and a woman. She knocked softly and opened the door of Jonas's office. His face was puffy, but he was smiling. She regarded him with skepticism, unsure of how to take this visage of confidence and health. It was hard for her to believe that this man who seemed so concrete and permanent could have any problems. Now as he smiled at her, she sensed that his happiness was too complete. Good news from the doctor would have meant he could joke around, possibly scare her, but the shining confidence displayed on his face told a different story. His smile cracked, and his gaze shifted. She rushed to him. Uncontrollable rivulets.

---

Murray and Maggie were talking on the phone. It was their first conversation since hearing that their father was dying and they were still trying to arrange travel, Murray from his upper east-side New York apartment and Maggie from St. Louis, where she had two children.

Murray was telling her: "I can't make it out of either airport today. I'm still so swamped with packing and closing things down here."

Maggie was saying: "Don't worry, I can fly out tonight. Dwight and the kids are going to follow me out in a few days when they can get away from school for a few weeks."

"Things are happening way too fast."

"Well, there's never any kind of schedule to these things. They just kind of happen. You have to be ready."

"I am not just kind of ready."

"It's ok Murray. We're about to go into a very turbulent month. Let's just both be as calm as we can and forgive everything anyone does. Think about mother."

"I have been. She's probably taking it worse than he is."

"She needs us to be there."

"Well, anyway, I can't get onto an airplane until Wednesday, at the earliest. I'm sorry, it's just worked out that way."

"It's fine, Murray."

"It's not like he's dying tomorrow, right?"

Maggie took a deep breath.

"He's not dying tomorrow, Murray, but he is dying."

"Rotten planning, only two weeks notice," Murray said, intending for it to be a joke.

"I know," said Maggie, "it hasn't been planned very well." Murray realized that she had not gotten his joke, and for a moment he questioned his entire mode of communicating with his sister.

Murray wondered if Maggie had spoken with their father. He wondered if death would change him, the concept of looming death, clock-ticking death. He wondered what Maggie and Jonas talked about. There was a lot that Murray wanted to take say while his father was still alive, but he knew that most of it would remain sitting in the back of his mind until he eventually absorbed it, until he eventually died himself, until that place where memories and reality begin to mingle, where Murray becomes everyone. And everyone is Jonas. Murray looked in the mirror and saw his father staring back at him. He sneered and the image vanished. There can not be similarities, he told himself, without being differences. The differences were endless, but Murray always gravitated towards the extremes. The cruelest difference between Murray and his father was that Jonas was dying and Murray was not.

---

Three days later, Jonas continued to wake up to the sound of his own heartbeat. The sun peaked through the curtains in a way that was warm, but Jonah's body remained cold. It didn't want to move. His eyes were the only part of his body that he seemed to control at this moment, because his mind was spinning beyond his control. The thoughts of a new day poured into his consciousness, making it more and more impossible for him to shut his eyes and return to sleep. Slowly, the thoughts filled his soul, and a smile began to cross his face. He stood and went to the shower, the beginning of another day.

Maggie was staying in her old room. He had seen her reading at the kitchen table at around 3 in the morning. She was reading the Bible, and odd habit that she hadn't picked up from Jonah. Nothing like a good death to bring out the searcher in people, he had thought as he pissed.

This morning, though, he was the first one awake, and such cynical thoughts were far from his mind. He had developed the habit of doing whatever he wanted. This was something he had forgotten how to do when he got married, and he was relishing in its simple and natural excess as he made breakfast. He hadn't bathed or shaved and his robe hung open. Bits of popping grease flew from the bacon and onto his legs as he flipped it over in the pan. He breathed in the fat of the pork and said to the pig: "Better you than me, Porky."

---

He wondered if his son's flight would come in today. It had taken the kid long enough to get ready. Many faces from the past had been flowing into his life recently. Many of them he remembered only as specters from the past, but as they appeared before him with their condolences and their final words of hope, Jonah was startled by their intensity, their passion, their life. They were all alive, and had been even as their reality had leaked from his life. They would continue to live after he had died. He bit into the bacon just as Lydia appeared in the kitchen. They glanced at each other briefly. She had a smile for him, but he knew that she wouldn't be able to communicate before she was at least working on making some coffee. She went to the pot and started running some water – then she spoke.

"I'm picking up Murray at the airport at 11:30."

"So he's actually going to make it then?"

"Of course he is, and don't you speak about your son that way when he gets here. It's very hard for him to get away from his job right now. He works hard."

"I know. It's just difficult for me to hold back, honey."

She came up from behind him and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. She hadn't brushed her teeth yet and her breath smelled just like Lydia's breath was supposed to smell. No chemical compounds holding back the odor, just the intense aroma he had tasted so many times before. "What do you think, you're dying or something?" She teased him. He put on his saddest puppy dog face.

"Dying of cancer," he made his eyes droop and his lip tremble. Lydia smiled and kissed him. He laughed and looked back at his paper. Lydia kept staring at him, her face constricting. She grabbed his face and pulled him to her again, kissing him with a fury she had never known, a fury that teenagers have during their first make-out sessions. She took his hand and pushed it against her breast and her head sank to his chest.

---

Jonas sat in the seat of the roller coaster. No one sat beside him. He was more comfortable alone. Coming to the amusement park alone had been awkward from the beginning. He hadn't thought of himself as a quiet grey-haired man in sunglasses, but he was very aware of his similarities to a pedophile as he walked among the rides. Mothers looked at him with an extra bit of judgement. He had kept to himself in the line, and had heard at least 2 groups mentioning him in their conversation. He had smiled, just as he smiled as the roller coaster began clinking along its tracks and dragging him out of the loading area, away on the tracks. Jonas wondered what he was doing at the amusement park for a while, then began to sweat a little as the combination of the warm sun and anxiety over his ever rising elevation washed over him. The coaster was taller than the ones he had taken Murray and Maggie on as children. They kept getting bigger and now he was riding one of the biggest, or so the signs all over the park had told him. Nothing but the best for your last hoorah, Lydia had been repeating to him lately. He worried about money and how they would get along, but Lydia wouldn't let him even look at a bank statement. He was able to do what he wanted and on his schedule.

Except the doctor's visits were more frequent now. He had elected not to tell any of his medical advisors about this particular activity. He could feel his heart rising in his throat just as the roller coaster rose to its final height and he was able to look all around him, guage his height, and quickly think about a body falling, crashing, bouncing on the ground of the amusement park below. What a way to go, he thought, and the coaster rushed downward, air whooshing through his hair and pressing his face firmly against his skull.

---

It was about every other day that Jonas did something that went against his doctor's wishes. He called them penny pinchers, trying to save him a few extra minutes here, an hour or two added to his life if he stopped eating salt NOW. Jonas wasn't the sort of man to deny himself pleasurable experiences, though. And having his whole family home made it feel like the holidays.

So they sat together at one of the most popular Italian restaurants in town and Jonas ordered a cream sauce. His physical appearance had changed only subtlely, aside from the amount of weight he had lost. Many of his friends forgot that he was dying as they spoke with Jonas, but the tightness in his face and the thinning hair he saw in his mirror every morning didn't allow Jonas to forget. Even tonight, he felt a loss of power in his grip as he tried to cut through a piece of chicken. He could become frustrated easily, sometimes even self-conscious that the entire series of events he was living through was being perpetuated by the very fact of his death. He knew that behind his back people were calling him a poor old bastard. He just wished that someone would say it to his face.

"More wine, sir?" the perky waitress asked him.

"Yes, I think so," Jonas replied. His wife glared at him and Murray smirked. Maggie and her husband Dwight glanced at each other. They could have been communicating about their children or any number of unspoken topics that married couples work their way through on a daily basis. Jonas wished that impending death had granted him some larger insight into humanity. "Just a small glass," Jonas clarified. The waitress poured and Jonas smelled the glass as he rested between bites. "Six weeks," he gloated. "You remember how they gave me six weeks, right?"

"That was only four weeks ago, dear." Lydia reminded him.

"That's practically the whole thing, and look at me! Out with my family and enjoying a great meal." He sipped some wine.

"That's right dad. You should be two-thirds dead now," said Murray. He smiled after he said it. He was never sure how much of his dark sense of humor the family would unerstand. Lydia glanced inconspicuously at Jonas, trying to gauge is reaction.

"I barely even feel half dead," Jonas responded. Lydia smiled. Under the table, Maggie squeezed Dwight's hand as they watched.

"That's good dad," Murray said. "Squeeze as much out of those fractions as you can."

Both men settled into their chairs and refocused on their meals with the feeling that a great deal had passed between them. Without any substantial words, entire conversations are known to pass between fathers and sons. It is the nature of the relationship – even fathers that are never at home tell their sons a great deal.

Later that night, Jonas woke in a sweat at 4 AM. He ran to the bathroom and gulped some pills. He stared into his own eyes as he splashed water onto his face, and all of his confidence and defiance was gone. Lydia continued to doze on the bed as Jonas pissed and paced. The bathroom was his office. The doctors were his new in-laws. His body was the last project he would ever work on, and he knew that a total collapse was inevitable. He put on a robe out of modesty for his emaciated frame. He could feel all of the thousands of points where the fabric touched his skin and they all hurt.

He snuck out of the bedroom and walked down the hall. He walked past the two doors, one on the left and one on the right, that symbolized his two children. They were both in their rooms. Jonas didn't know if Dwight was sleeping over tonight or not. They had a hotel room a few miles away. Tiptoeing down the hallway to the kitchen, the emptiness of the house struck Jonas. What a waste, he thought. These walls should throb with life. Where was the dog he had grown up with? Long gone, don't even bother with it. He poured some milk into his favorite glass and sipped once. The glass had streaks of blue stained glass around the rim. He held it up to the kitchen light and opened his hand. The glass shattered all over the floor. One chunk went into his big toe, which began to bleed slowly. The milk covered the tiles. The mess was catastrophic, and the pure colors of the milk and blood mixed together into something so runny and dull that it made Jonas's head hurt.

Intense pain streaked through his whole body now. His big toe and brain communicated, meeting and causing more problems in his back. He screamed out and supported himself on the kitchen counter. He looked around for any help. The phone was across the room. The hallway was still dark. Silence filled the womb of the house, just a gentle inhuman hum. He screamed out again, this time with purpose. "Somebody come help me!" A deeply ingrained pain shone through and all of the pressure of his life was upon him. He stood frozen and waited for the cavalry of his family, the soothing balm of human interaction. His daughter Maggie was the first one into the kitchen, and her face dropped to the floor as her father collapsed in front of her. Lydia, pulling closed her old ratty robe, rushed down the hallway. Maggie was rushing to the phone, calling an ambulance. Murray came into the kitchen and knelt before ihs father.

"Where does it hurt dad?" He asked.

"Chest. My chest."

"We're going to get you help. Don't worry." Murray stood up and accosted Maggie at the phone. "When will they be here?"

Lydia grasped Jonas's hand. "That's right baby," she told him. "Nothing to worry about." She grinned. She wanted to laugh, but she doubted he wanted her too. The attitude of their children was so humorous to her, but she didn't want to flaunt her own health while her husband bled. She just clutched his hand and stroked his head. Let him rest, she thought.. Let him rest now.

---

Despite what his mind demanded, his eyes opened. Light shined into his experience, waking up the conscious mind that had been hibernating. Before his eyes focused, he knew he was not at home, Two smallish fuzzballs standing at the end of his bed came into better view as he adjusted. He recognized his grandchildren. They smiled. He was glad to see them, remembered back on the months of hospital visits he had done with his brother when his mother had slowly gone deeper and deeper into the effects of Parkinsons Disease. It had bonded them over the most typical part of being human, dying. Now, as he experienced it himself from the bed that he was sure he would die in, he remembered the calm of those nights, his mother's breath coming rapidly, then slowly, changing but constant. Until one day it stopped.

Maggie called the kids away from the bed and they obeyed, moreso than Maggie ever did at that age. Every moment brought back feelings, memories, fleeting visions of lazy days. He had seen Maggie learning. He had watched her rebel. He had seen her come to grips with the world. Now she walked towards his bed and put her hands on the cold rail. "How you feeling now, old man?" she asked.

"Don't you be calling me old. Then you're middle age. Besides, old as I am I'm still to young for this shit." Lydia stroked her husbands hair, tucking it behind his ear. He had aged years in the last couple of days. She reflected on how quick death came calling. Only an instant, really. One second life, another second, death. She could tell from the labor that went into each of Jonas's breaths that he wouldn't last long. He was never one to make others wait.

---

Jonas wept at nights, when only his wife was beside him. Murray or Maggie would be there, passed out in some lobby somewhere. When it was just Jonas and Lydia, he cried like a child the first time he learns about death. Jonas was old enough to understand death, and wise enough to accept it as a necessary contrast to life, but at nights he wallowed in his lousy lot. Lydia put up with a lot, questions about how long she would wait to see other men, and second guessing about the parenting jobs he had done on their children. She told him that it didn't matter now, and so he allowed himself to sob over a world that was never perfect and changes that he had promised to make.

One morning Murray burst into the room wearing a large overcoat. He closed the door behind him, locking it dramatically, and then produced a plate of breakfast food from Chloe's. Jonas had taken the family there every week for nearly 6 years until the family revolted against the punishing regiment. Murray had the meal that Jonas ordered on each of their visits: a stack of hotcakes, 2 sausages, 3 scrambled eggs covered in cheese and 2 pieces of buttered toast. Maggie brought out a cup of coffee. All of these foods were utterly off limits to Jonas, and the doctors wouldn't have liked to see this. They might have called it a last breakfast. Jonas allowed them to set the tray of food down before him and say thanks to his family. Maggie's husband and children were there, and Lydia began preparing his meal.

Jonas didn't want to tell them that he wasn't even hungry. He did manage to utter something through his mixed feelings. "No wonder I'm dying." Sausage was dipped in syrup and the sweet and sour taste hit his tongue anticlimactically. The food wasn't doing it for him. He recognized this as one of the new thoughts that were swirling into his brain. He felt himself scanning through every key moment in his life before stopping on the current one and allowing himself some marvel. He told Lydia to stop shovelling food into his mouth. She was trying to get the most out of this plot to make him eat, but Jonas was no longer interested. He had stumbled upon a secret that changed the meaning of everything. It was so clear to him. This moment was what he had spent his entire life preparing for. He saw his children, his grandchildren. He saw that they wanted to spend more time with him. He reflected back on the favorite things he had done in his life. How many times had he eaten these pancakes and sausage just the way he wanted? How many times had he taken the long way home just to walk along the river? Every second he spent in every worthwhile endeavor of his life had been his build up to this moment. He wanted to avoid the eyes of his family, who now looked a bit worried. He found a window and saw a part of a tree thrusting past it towards the sky. "It's been an honor," he said. "It's been an honor."